Obama Enjoys Picnic on Private Beach While His Sister Hides in the Bushes

I thought I'd share some of the items in this article I read in the Wall Street Journal. It's about Obama and his vacation in Hawaii. When you read these excerpts, you'll know why I posted them.

On his first trip home as commander in chief, President Barack Obama, whom Hawaiians call a favorite "child of the land," has gone underground.

During their vacation, the Obamas have secluded themselves in a compound near a military base. For the first six days, the only people here who saw the president up close were some Marines, his staff and a few friends.

The city shut down a public beach so the Obamas and their guests could swim on Sunday. On Tuesday, they picnicked alone on Hanauma Bay. Security at the compound is so tight that Mr. Obama's two addresses to Americans after the foiled Christmas attack on an airplane in Detroit weren't televised live because satellite trucks couldn't get through in time.

It is not unusual for presidents to find they have a more distant relationship with their hometown constituents than they did before they entered the presidential security bubble. Still, Mr. Obama, by necessity or choice, has widened the gap between himself and the public. Political observers and White House officials say he generally travels with a fuller security detail than his predecessors did.

Hawaii's Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye explained Mr. Obama's absence on local TV Wednesday: The president deserves a rest, and is busy mulling his next steps after the attempted attack in Detroit. Mr. Obama didn't make public comments in the immediate days after the foiled bombing, drawing criticism from Republicans.

The Obamas' itinerary is a closely guarded secret that even the island's finely tuned grapevine, known as the "coconut wireless," has trouble penetrating. When the Obamas and their entourage visited Alan Wong's restaurant in the president's old neighborhood last weekend, a couple dozen locals milled expectantly behind police barricades at the end of the street. After the crowd stood for a couple of hours outside her wine shop, Liane Fu went out to ask what they were there for. "A lot of them didn't know," she said. Marylou Cababat, who works in a nearby noodle shop, said she "thought I'd see our black president, but all I saw were a lot of white people" -- the security cordon -- "running in the other direction" from the restaurant.

After the Obamas hustled out of the restaurant to the car, Mr. Obama's sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, hid in the shrubs while her husband retrieved her red Subaru, said a reporter documenting the scene.

On New Year's Eve, the Obamas watched "Avatar" in a shopping-mall theater cleared of people. "I must admit that when you close down shopping centers you're pushing the envelope of the patience that people might have otherwise," said Hawaii Democratic state senator Clayton Hee.

After five days without a single Obama sighting, the island's two local newspapers, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Honolulu Advertiser, lost interest in tracking him. In the Advertiser this week, coverage of the visit ran inside, getting lesser play than stories such as "Few Attend Meeting on Rats," and "Sashimi Fish Piling Up on Ice for New Year's Platters."